“Were you close?” asked the boy.
“No,” moaned the grandfather. “I got all six numbers wrong. All six! I said 12-5-28-4-17-31—that’s what I put on the form. If I had put 3-16-18-19-34-1, then everything would have been different.”
Chris Hansen at the Justin Bieber Concert
His daughter was dying, literally dying, to go to the Justin Bieber concert, and it was only going to be one night, and her mother was going to be out of town, and it was practically impossible to get tickets anyway except, except! He could always get tickets to anything thanks to his connections as the longtime host of the NBC series To Catch a Predator.
But Chris Hansen did not want to go to the Justin Bieber concert.
“I just think,” he said, choosing his words to his twelve-year-old daughter carefully, “I just think that my presence there … might make some people … uncomfortable.”
“Who? Pedophiles?” snapped his daughter. “You’re afraid of making pedophiles uncomfortable?”
“Yes—no!—I mean …” stammered Chris Hansen. “Look. Anyone who has followed my career knows I am not afraid of making pedophiles uncomfortable. Okay? That’s just Chris Hansen 101. Let’s get that straight right off the bat.”
“Then what is it?” she challenged.
Tough girl. His daughter all right.
“What is it, Dad?”
“You want to know what it is?” said Chris Hansen. “You really want to know? I go to the Justin Bieber concert, and everybody’s looking at me. You know why? They’re looking at me trying to figure out who I’m looking at. So everybody’s staring at me. And I have to do them the courtesy of not looking back at them, because what they don’t realize is that if I look at them back for as much as a split second, then everybody’s gonna stare at them for the next two hours. You understand why, don’t you? And by the way, do you know who’s not looking at me? There are only a few people at this point who are not looking at me, who are trying to avoid eye contact. Do you know who those people are? That’s right,” said Chris Hansen. “Pedophiles. Those are the pedophiles. So, great, now I know who all the pedophiles are. That’s a fun thing to know, isn’t it? And now, I am morally obligated to do something—but what do I do? How am I supposed to alert someone in a position of authority that these people are definitely pedophiles who are destroying lives, but that the only evidence I can offer to support this charge is that these alleged pedophiles are suspiciously not staring at me? Huh? I’d look like something of an egomaniac, don’t you think? So you know what I have to do, to make it tolerable for myself? There’s only one thing I can do, Kaitlin. I have to stare straight ahead, right at Justin Bieber, never taking my eyes off him, not even for a second. And when people see me at a Justin Bieber concert, staring holes into Justin Bieber, you know what they think? They think, Ahhh, I see. It all makes sense now. And I don’t even care—I don’t have an ego about stuff like that,” he lied, “but besides all that, besides all that, what about the fact that I bust pedophiles eight hours a day, five days a week, and maybe for once in my life I just want to relax on a Saturday night spending time with my daughter without any of this on my mind?”
She started to cry.
Dammit, thought Chris Hansen. I shouldn’t have used that tone. She’s just a kid who wanted to go to a concert. I didn’t have to make it all about me. Also, I didn’t need to exaggerate my hours. It’s more like four hours a day, four days a week.
“You know what,” he said, “I’ll wear a hat or something. It’ll be fine.”
“You look stupid in hats,” she said.
“Hey. That hurt my feelings,” he said.
In the end, he took her to the Justin Bieber concert. It wasn’t as much fun as she thought it was going to be, and it wasn’t as bad as he said it was going to be. The concert was okay, and so were they.
Great Writers Steal
“What if they have an alarm?”
“I told you. We’re going to get out too fast for that to matter.”
“I don’t know. Something feels off.”
“Hey! Nothing’s off, okay? It’s what we’re doing. Remember what the book said?”
“ ‘Good writers borrow, great writers steal.’ ”
“You want to be a great writer?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure? Because you don’t sound sure.”
“I want to be a great writer!”
“You want to be a great writer?”
“Yes! I want to be a great writer! I want to be a legend!”
“Damn right. We’re both going to be legends. Kerouac, Burroughs, Bukowski—they probably stole all kinds of stuff.”
“Bret Easton Ellis probably still robs places.”
“Liquor stores, probably.”
“Who knows! Probably. I pictured maybe banks. The point is, we never hear about any of it.”
“Right. Right.”
“Right?!”
“Right!”
“Ready?!”